How to Lose Weight the Easy and Fun Way!

In talking to a number of people over the last year it has come to my attention that many people have a hard time losing weight.  I was sorry to hear about their troubles, so I have been promising that I would share my story and the diet I used to get closer to an ideal weight.  I hope people find this helpful and encouraging.  I am pretty confident that if you follow this plan you will lose weight.

The story begins on a fine evening at the end of October a few years ago.  For whatever reason reason I was looking at Life insurance weight tables and they informed me that I was 35 pounds overweight.  I was horrified.  How had this happened???  All my life I had been reasonably athletic and also somewhat poor - both of which had led to me to be perpetually lean.  For instance, in college  I would only eat a $.50 can of corn for lunch every day (I am glad those days are in the past).   Well I can tell you what happened - I got a job and the paycheck that goes with it.  I am not a flashy person, but I do enjoy eating.  It is one of my primary recreational activities.  So once I had a paycheck and no longer had to eat cans of corn, I would go ahead and buy that big cookie after eating lunch.  Why not - I deserved it right???  Well I did start to notice over the course of a couple of months that my pants were getting tighter, but I could ignore that easy enough.  I did not notice that I looked any different.  Reading the numbers on the tables sparked me into action.  At the time I was in a hotel in Urbana Champagne.  I promptly walked down to the hotel gym and started riding the exercise bike.  I think I rode it for 45 min and I was pretty tired at the end.  I believe I burned around 450 calories.  Next I decided to give up eating cold turkey for the last day of the conference I was at.  This was tough because conference food is good., but all that good food comes with a caloric price.  I think I may have cheated and eaten a strawberry.  Even when I got back to NM it was tough because it was Halloween and my roommate had a big pot full of leftover candy bars that were dying to be eaten.

Now one I got back to NM I obviously had to find a diet that was sustainable for losing weight.  I started doing a little research on what actually caused people to gain weight.  Now we have all heard a number of urban legends regarding weight loss.  For instance the most famous one is that you should eat many small meals instead of three large meals.  Another one is that if you cut your caloric intake dramatically your metabolism will slow down and you will not burn so many calories.  Well I am a very results-oriented person, and based on my experience all of this discussion is not worth listening to.  In reality losing weight is really simple.  Basically if you burn more calories in a day than you eat you will lose weight.    I am a numbers person so basically what it boils down to is this.  For every 3500 calories you burn that you do not make up for with food you will lose a pound.  Armed with this knowledge I could create a goal I could shoot for.

Here was my plan.  I decided I would exercise for an hour every day.  I am a very busy guy so this is the max time I could spend at the YMCA.  I started out riding a stationary bike but eventually I transitioned to running on a treadmill.  Running is pretty much the most time-efficient way any normal person can burn calories.  My hour-long workouts typically resulted in burning roughly 600 calories a day.  Now the resting metabolism for a guy like me is roughly 2400 calories per day.  That means in a day I was burning 2400 + 600 = 3000 calories a day.

Now the normal recommendation is to lose something like 1-2 pounds a week, but I lead a somewhat undomesticated, rock N roll lifestyle so I decided I had neither the time nor the patience for that.  I decided I would try to run a 2000 calorie a day deficit.  This would mean I would lose a pound every other day and that I would lose 35 pounds in about 70 days.  I decided this was acceptable.    In order to do this would require that I eat a total of 1000 calories per day.

So next I started looking at the calorie content of food to see what would work for a diet.  I knew I needed protein because I was working out alot.  So I looked at the protein content of food.  I figured I would eat some lean meat.  I started out by eating the following every day:  For breakfast I would have a cup of yogurt (100 calories) for lunch I would have half a bean burrito (~300) calories, and for dinner after my workout I would have a salad (no salad dressing, only vinegar) with half a pound of turkey and a little bit of cottage cheese (~500 calories).  For a nighttime snack I would have one rice cake with salsa.  I really like salsa and thankfully salsa has almost no calories.

Now this was a pretty demanding it is true.  Actually for the first two weeks I woke up tired every day.  I was also thinking about food alot, and my brain seemed to be thinking slower than usual.  I was definitely losing weight, but I was getting so hungry that I resorted to eating Tofu as a snack one night.  That was not pleasant.  The Tofu experience convinced me that I needed to make a change.  I read somewhere that your brain needs fat to operate correctly and I liked the sound of that so I decided to go with it.  My current diet was really low on fat.  Now I do not have much time for cooking so I started looking at fast food to see if any fast food would give me protein and fat.  I looked at Subway and Taco Bell and some others, but nothing had a good ratio of calories to protein and other nutrients.  This is when I had to start thinking a little unconventionally - I checked McDonalds.  Now most food at McDonalds has a pretty low ratio of protein to calories, except for one Sandwich.  It turns out the double quarter pounder with cheese is actually very nutrient dense for the number of calories it has.  The Double quarter pounder has 750 calories, but it also has nearly 100% of your daily protein and fat needs.  Much to my surprise I found it was basically the perfect diet food.  If you do not believe me look at the nutrition information:

Double quarter pounder with cheese nutrition information:
http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/product_nutrition.sandwiches.287.double-quarter-pounder-with-cheese.html 

I decided to stop eating the dinner salad and switching to the double quarter pounder for dinner after my workout.  My energy level went way up and my happiness level went way up too.  I no longer thought about food all the time because the fat in the double quarter pounder satisfied my food craving.  I never thought about tofu again.  And prehaps more importantly I was still losing a pound every other day.  Another plus is that I made new friends at McDonalds.  They started getting my order ready as I walked in the story every day.  I was a regular.

I carried this diet out for 6 weeks.  I lost 29 pounds from where I started and this even included a period where I went to a different conference with really good food (I restrained myself the first day, but the next two days I indulged myself.)  I realized I could stop at this point because I visited some friends in San Diego and someone came up to me and asked if I was alright.  They were wondering I had gotten cancer.  So I decided the life insurance company did not know what they were talking about and I went back to normal eating habits - just in time for Christmas :-).  Of course now normal meant keeping an net 0 daily calorie intake - which is easy when you have been eating only 1000 calories a day.

Now I have to make a disclaimer - I may be a doctor, but I am not the kind that helps people.  As my brother likes to say I am a "machine doctor," so take this with a grain of salt - literally, after the daily run you might be low on salt. I also want to leave you with a few notes:

NOTES:

1. I found I really like running on the treadmill.  It forces you to run harder and it is less damaging on the joints.  I find if I run hard on the street multiple days in a row I will get shin splints, but this never happens with the treadmill because it is cushioned.  
2. If you look at the numbers diet is by far the most important element in this equation.  Actually I could have not exercised at all and still lost alot of weight.  Conversely, you can exercise alot and then undo it in a second by eating a few cookies.  
3. Many people might think this diet would make you weak, but I cut 14 minutes off my best half-marathon time doing this.  I also felt more agile.
4. If you do not like double quarter pounders with cheese you could just eat the appropriate size steak instead.  

After the diet ended I continued the running.  I eventually got down to a sub 1:30 half-marathon which puts me in the top 6% of men in San Diego who raced.  Not bad in my opinion.  Now I am trying to get to an 1:20 half marathon.

I hope this story inspires and helps people to lose weight.  Please feel free to share your weight loss story with me in the comments.  I like to hear people's success.

A 2 Degree-of-Freedom Perspective of the Catholic Landscape.

Over the course of the last couple years I have realized that the scales we use to classify different types of Catholics may be impeding our spiritual progress.  My particular concern is with Faithful Catholics that are more on the conservative side.  Catholicism is a tough religion to follow.  You spend many, many years (read decades) struggling just to get a sense of it and live somewhat "comfortably" with it.  I am not sure many people at all even get to this point.  It seems you almost have to adopt a somewhat conservative stance at some point to get to this point.  It can be done from a more progressive standpoint, but it seems people are much more likely to fall away from that side or at least be less consistent about it.  I may have a bias here though because I came more from a conservative outlook.  I have observed there may be a different lesson learned from the other direction that I am just not able to observe.  What I have been finding myself trying to explain to people for a few years though now is that we should not be content with a simply conservative Catholic Church.  I think this is what Pope Francis is really trying to push right now.  It is also the case that the role of the Laity is increasing.  The Laity is more educated than ever and we do have a role in developing the body of Christ.  This implies taking a more "progressive" stance.  It is the case thought that when a "conservative" hears about "progressive-ism" they tend to right away think that some kind of evil is afoot.  What I am trying to get across is that this is not always the case.  It is entirely possible to stay within a defined set of constraints and come up with new insights and frameworks that push the community forward.  I am a research engineer.  From my point of view this is completely possible.  I learned all about physics and chemistry and math...  And what I learned is that with those tools we constantly need to update our models as new information, tools and skills come to light.   We occasionally need to look at problems from new paradigms.  We are not throwing away all the work of the past, we are just using it in a different way.  It takes a certain kind of person to effectively do this.  Oftentimes this person has a rebellious streak to them but demands logical consistency.  I know many people like this myself, but they are not common in the general population.  The even rarer person is the deeply spiritual Catholic who is Faithful to the Magisterium of the Church, but also recognizes the need for new "paradigms" so to speak.  It is very intellectually easy to be outright rebellious and just throw teachings out in order to further some agenda a person might have.  It is much harder to find a person who accepts the Truths of Divine Revelation, but is willing to try and apply new human methods of looking at them.  Personally I have seen so many results in fields such a information theory, game theory, math, psychology, sociology, management and negotiation, and engineering that shed additional light on Faith that I baffled that theologians are not having a field day picking off intellectual low-hanging fruit left and right.  I am actually kind of disappointed.  On the other side I occasionally see things in these secular fields that could benefit from the Divine Intuition offered by the Church.  It is easier in this case though for me to understand why they might ignore it.  But I digress.  My point is that is is possible to be Faithful to the Magisterium and be a progressive thinker.  Many of our Saints would fall into this category as would Jesus himself.  This is why many Saints were investigated by the Church during their time.  They were promoting ideas/actions that were revolutionary and meant non-incremental change.  But the Saints were obedient to the will of legitimate authority.  I think more Catholics should be encouraged to engage in this type of activity.  There are so many results available from so many fields and such a massive ability to collect data on the human condition that the time is supremely ripe for a Catholic Intellectual renaissance.  To make matters even better we are currently in the perfect position to mess it up.  The secular world has little to no respect for the Catholic church right now on account of the sex scandles.  The upside of this is that any mistake we make now is easy to dismiss from a secular point of view because we are just those backwards Catholics who don't allow women to be priests or use birth control.   Actually I get excited as I write this because as a professional intellectual I can assure you that it is absolutely necessary to allow tolerance for mistakes in order to move forward.  If the Catholic Church were more respected we would probably take a more reluctant stance towards allowing intellectual freedom and mistake making.  I say lets make the best of the situation we find ourselves in.  

I have also noticed many non-Catholics, and even Catholics themselves do not really understand the Catholic family with any amount of breadth.  I have spent the last four years living in a place with very few young Catholics.  Most of the people I interact with here are some kind of secular humanist/atheist who have no idea what the Catholic church is about.  My impression is that they think of it as some super-coherent, wealthy cult with brain-washed followers who blindly do whatever the Pope says when and his clergy minions are not involved in some kind of scandal or attempt to oppress someone.  

For some reason people have no trouble thinking that a religion like Islam is complicated with groups like Sunnis and Shiites, and various tribal, historical and geopolitical differences.  We seem to think that since the Catholic Church of the west is right in front of our faces that it is easy to understand based on sound bites on the news.  

I am guessing that part of the reason people think of us as a uniform mob is that the Catholic Church likes to emphasis our temporal and geographic unity - and for good reason.  However, while it is true that we are unified, but we are far from homogeneous.  There are something like 23 different rites within the Church.  Most people are somewhat familiar with the Roman rite, but are totally unaware of the others.   There are slightly different little "t" traditions all over the world.  And it is more common than not for baptized Catholics to ignore the teachings of the Church.  We are also far from wealthy.  It is more like we have high revenue, not so much high profit.  Alot of money flows through the Church because we are attending to alot of different concerns. A reactionary is happy with going back to ways we used to do things, at this time people in this category tend to lean towards pre-Vatican II policies.  

In order to give people not familiar with the Church family a better sense of what we are about I have made this chart.  I got tired of the 1-D scale that involved Conservatives/Orthodox, Reactionaries and Progressives/liberals.  This is an elementary way to look at the world that does not even begin to capture the subtitles of what is really going on.  For now I just did the cliche cartesian thing and added a second dimension.  I might try something else later, but this will do for now.  In this case, the second dimension is whether or not a person or organization is Faithful to the Magisterium of the Church.  I have populated the chart with examples of people or groups that I perceive as falling into the different categories.  To clarify a little, in my terminology, a progressive is a person who is trying to aggressively pursue new paradigms of thought or practice.  They might also be looking for order-of-magnitude changes.  I consider JPII and his "Theology of the Body" an example of a progressive.  This was a fairly new way of thinking that had not been considered before.  I consider Christopher West and his approach to the Theology of the Body also in this Category because he adopted a very modern style to presenting it and has received alot of flack in the process.  A conservative may still be tending toward new growth, but in a much more incremental manner.  They might be content simply finding new ways to communicate what we already know or thing.  When I say Faithful to the Magisterium I basically mean that a person at least does not obstinately say or do things that are against the Church teaching or authority.  Hopefully more positively they uphold the teachings of the Church and spread them, but practically this is a hard definition to use because it is hard to apply to progressives due to differences of perspectives and opinions.  The "questionable" category here implies people/groups that I perceive do something that appears to be against Church teachings, but they may still be in good standing with their superiors, or the matter is somewhat being debated.  I put "Live Action" in this group because traditional Catholic teaching is that lying is never an acceptable tactic, but some reputable Catholics are willing to come to their defense so I am just not sure.  Personally I would not want to be a part of it, but it is a tough judgement call.  The no group refers to people/groups that may be baptized Catholics who are blatantly against Church teachings, or authority.  Such people promote the use of artificial birth control, promote abortion, have separated themselves from their legitimate Superiors, or obstinately remain in some form of state of sin.  Some of the groups are in this column are schismatic Catholic groups.   I am admittedly a little loose with my whole terminology - for instance Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden have not been publically excommunicated, but they actively promote Abortion which implies a self-excommunication has occurred.  Who I put in which group is not so important and is a matter for debate.  The more important idea I am trying to get across is that there are different ways of looking at Catholicism that are valid.  From a Salvation point of view I assert that the main thing that matters is that you fall into the column of Yes's with regards to being Faithful to the Magisterium.  Basically being sure to stay free from mortal sin and practicing lawful obedience.  I would say that if you fall in this category it does not matter if you want to get into the Catholic Charismatic Renewal or go to Latin Mass every day of the week with a mantilla on your head.  From a salvation point of view it probably does not matter.  On the other hand, there are conservative groups that have removed themselves from the Church and have gone against Church teaching.  SSPX is probably the best example of this.  I have been around the Catholic block more that a few times now and I have seen other examples.  For instance before the scandal broke concerning the founder of the Legion of Christ I was always a little leary of the Legion from the first time I ever heard of them.  The thing about the Legion that made me nervous is that they seemed to be too controlling and militant.  My experience has been that tendencies in this direction are not healthy.  There are unhealthy and health levels of discipline and they seemed on the unhealthy side.  I think this had something to do with their leadership.  I hope the organization goes in a holy direction from here on out.  

My main goal in talking about this is to encourage those who might be so inclined to move into the Upper left box I call Faithful to the Magisterium/Progressive.  This group is not for everyone and admittedly it is probably pretty rare to find a person with the temperament and spiritual confidence required operate there, but maybe someone will say, "I saw this interesting result during my work involving how parrots talk to people more during morning hours vs at lunchtime and that times into so an so theological concept in this new way."  And when that person arises I would like to meet them so we can talk and move forward with action.  

Thought Crime, Virtue, Lust and Mind Reading at UC Berkeley

Virtue is Beautiful - Gardens on the Mount of the Beatitudes 

When I was growing up I would come across this particular passage in the Bible that I found quite challenging.

Matthew 5: 27-28
27
“You have heard that it was said,r ‘You shall not commit adultery.’
28
But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

For a dew years (~11-15 years old) I thought this passage was just impossible to follow and so I did not even bother trying.  How do you really control what your mind thinks?  Especially when you are a middle/high school boy?  It also seemed be concerned something that was a non-issue.  What did it really matter what you thought anyway?

It really does not matter what happened, but something did happen back when I was a sophomore in high school that caused me to take a much more serious look at this.  I basically started taking this issue of lust much more seriously.  I earnestly began trying to fight off every lustful thought that tried to enter my mind without exception.  This was not an easy task at all.  It was without a doubt the toughest thing I ever tried to undertake at that time and ever since.  I tried so hard to control my thoughts that my head would really hurt.  The way I went about it probably was not the best, and I could recommend different ways to go about it, but I found it was possible to succeed in this endeavor. Prayer and discernment were definitely a big part of it.  So was the application of intelligence and good judgement in terms of knowing what was a temptation and what was a sin.  Actually knowing what I know now, I can say it is challenging, but is not as impossible as it seemed at first.  I have to admit though that I really did not know what the point of all this effort was other than to avoid something that was considered a serious sin.

A couple of years ago I came across this Atheist cartoon that deals with the issue of "sinful thoughts." Basically they paint God as a cop out looking for thought-crime offenders.  To be honest at first I had to sympathize with their view.  To some extent that is what it looks like, but at the same time I also knew they were missing something - I just was not sure what it was.  It made me think, but ultimately what I realized was that what secular society in general lacks is the concept of "purity of heart."  When I say purity of heart I am talking about some intrinsic quality of a person that orients them to good (More or less)  This is pretty much what Jesus is talking about as he lays down the beatitudes just before he talks about anger and list in a person's heart.  This is what I realized was important. This is really nothing new, I knew it all along, what I did not realize is that not everyone had the concept of purity of heart to work from.  My experience now is that this makes a big difference.



From a secular perspective it is so easy to dismiss the concept of a pure heart and striving toward some internal goodness simply because there is no way to observe or measure it.  At one time behavioral psychology (see B.F. Skinner) was big for just this reason.  Who cares what is going on inside when you cannot observe it.  Lets focus on what we can measure and restrict our understanding to just that.

Well from the Catholic perspective only God can really know the heart, but there may eventually be ways to at least know a little more about what is going on inside the mind.  About two years ago I learned about some work being done in the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley on decoding visual images being seen by the brain.  It is really remarkable.  I invite you to take a look at this video on the work.  Basically they are able to show it is feasible to tell what a person is seeing solely based on fMRI measurements.  They basically do it by applying machine learning techniques.  One day this could be used for a whole variety of applications such as mind reading, interrogation, etc etc.  Imagine if an artist no longer had to practice painting or drawing.  They could focus solely on creativity and print their ideas directly from the mind.  I digress though.  The more interesting question is what if your spouse had a way to know who you were fantasizing about even though they did nothing to act on it? This is a long way off from being a household item, but the day could come when a spouse stumbles on a brain scan log-file and find out about the other person you might currently be enamored with.  I just thought this was interesting because as science evolves, what we are capable of measuring and observing may have an impact on secular ethics, and it may look more like the "purity of heart" we strive for in Catholicism.

Thought crime might not be so innocent one day.

My Criticisms of the Big 5, and an alternative Dynamic Systems Paradigm

 (Disclaimer - this is a really long facebook post I once made during an arguement and it is kind of a work in progress right now.  I just want to get some of the ideas out there.  This is basically a summary of my objections to the Big 5 and an alternative Dynamic Systems Theory model)

This is an article I reference just to show an example of the common criticisms of MBTI

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-grant/goodbye-to-mbti-the-fad-t_b_3947014.html 

Ok  - Here is what I think.  First, from what I understand all the studies that have been used to check the validity of Meyers Briggs do not use the theory correctly.  As JT Cove points out the author of this article does not use the theory even remotely correctly.  All the Academic discussions I have seen on this do the same thing.  They ignore the role of cognitive functions and instead use the simplistic idea that MBTI models personality as what I can best describe as a Cartesian, 4-dimensional “pseudo-binary” space.  When you use this line of thinking (which is incorrect) you guess that for E-I, S-N, F-T, and J-P you should see bi-modal distributions in the data.  This is not what I understand you see in the data though.  The data always comes out unimodal with a mean in the middle.  The problem is though that the MBTI theory does not model personality in Cartesian sense at all.  The mathematical framework that I currently think best matches Jungian theory is something more like a Markov chain or a probabilistic graphical network, where the states in the model are the cognitive functions.  If nothing else I think some kind of dynamic system model is much more appropriate to model human personality.  Actually one of the main strengths of MBTI over the big 5 in my opinion is that it does take into account that all people have thinking and feeling, etc, etc.  They are just used in different preference orders (sort of).  The author in the article totally misses this.  Big 5 just places people on a static point on a continuum.  To the best of my knowledge no psychologist in academia has ever tried to fit any kind of dynamic system model to personality outside of perhaps some work with infants.  Dario Nardi at UCLA has also mentioned dynamic systems models, but I can find no peer-reviewed papers of his.  If humans are better modeled like dynamic systems I really do not know what the resulting distributions in a Cartesian representation these types of models would give on the questionnaires used to check the validity of psychological tests.  Hard to say if it should come out bi-modal or uni-modal.  I could actually use some hand-wavy central-limit theorem argument to explain the fact that the data does keep coming out unimodal.  Personality is a pretty complicated and this hunch is not totally unreasonable but I really have no idea.  It would need to be studied more deeply.  This leads me to my criticisms of big 5. 

First, we need to take a step back and look at what big 5 actually is.  Big 5 is really a data-driven, static, 5 dimensional Cartesian model of human personality.  From what I can tell psychology researchers basically took a bunch of surveys and performed factor analysis on them and got out 5 main factors and said that is a good way to model human personality.  Now the fact that it is purely data driven means there was never any theory really used to guide the investigation other than perhaps the implicit idea that humans can be broken into independent factors.  This means in some ways it is arguable whether or not it is even “scientific” because there really is no hypothesis or model you are trying to test against.  It is more like a modified form of an observation.  This criticism is common and I think the big 5 article on Wikipedia also mention it.  My main question though is, why in the world does anyone think a static, Cartesian model is a good way to capture human personality?   What about humans is static?  Why did they do this?  I will give my theory.  Basically psychology is often considered a “soft” science and as a result I think the academic field sort of has an "inferiority complex."  In order to maintain credibility they seem to try to tie everything to data as much as possible.  This is reasonable enough, but I see at least one problem in the implementation.  Psychology education appears to have chosen statistical factor analysis as its weapon of choice for data analysis.  They focus on using statistical factor analysis for pretty much everything.  Problem is that in doing this they are making the assumption that everything can be modeled in a static Cartesian space.  This is kind of ridiculous.  Many important phenomena are much better described using other types of models.  Dynamic system models for instance (This is my current preference for modeling humans).  I am pretty sure Psychology researchers do not have the same kind of mathematical maturity that an engineer or computer-science researcher has.  My background was full of dynamic system models and techniques do exist to fit data to them.  I think psychology is in a mode where they really like factor analysis and either are not aware of other types of models, or they just do not want to bother with them.  I feel like they are kind of caught in a case of “When your only tool is a hammer the whole world becomes a bunch of nails.”

One quick mention on the tests.  I do not think the current survey-based tests are very good.  They are not really repeatable or reliable.  I am currently exploring the possibility of using different types of tests to measure personality.  I am wondering for instance if tracking the kinds of moves people make in playing certain kinds of games might provide a better measure. Fe might be measurable by looking at how much vital signs in a person change when exposed to certain images.  I am also curious if for instance S and N people might remember details from scenes differently.  This might be a measurable difference.  I think better testing techniques need to be developed before progress can be made.    

 I believe my thoughts on this could actually be used to build much more life-like machines.  I think many algorithms you see in computer science map to cognitive functions.  For instance, search algorithms seem sort of like Ne.  Design of experiment is like Se.  Simulations are like Ni.  Pattern recognition is like Si.  POMDPs seem a lot like Te.  Hierarchical deep learning and PCA are sort of like aspects of Ti.  Neural networks seem somewhat similar to Fe (You can make fast decisions on complicated data but you really do not know how you did it).  Fe is in some ways like using your own system as an analog computer to calculate results about external events.  I think you could make a machine with current algorithms and arranging their use according to some kind of dynamic system model such as a Markov Chain.  I have seen some cutting edge personality engineering work for robotics, and in my opinion it is pretty crude.  Engineering researchers are blindly adopting big 5 as well, and I think it is to their detriment.  Engineering is not constrained as science is to concepts such as searching for “truth.”  It just has to work.  I think I can make a better human-like machine using MBTI theory.  I am laying down theoretical framework for this in my spare time.

At the end of the day MBTI is just a model like anything else.  The pertinent question is how useful is it.  I know however that a person is going to have a hard time convincing me that there is no such phenomena as the “INTJ” or “Fe.”  I think if nothing else Jung was really onto something.  May not be perfect but something is there worth taking a look at. A dynamics systems approach may be the paradigm shift the personality research field needs to advance. 

The year starts off in flames... Messages For Liam #001

 After about a year of hiatus I am getting back to telling the story of how I spent my senior year of college building a racecar.  This is the beginning of the story.  The worst day of my life to date, and my truck going up in flames. 

 

Zombie Apocalyspe, Emotion and Sin

It is no secret that zombies are very popular today.  What is it about swarms of grotesque, walking dead creatures that appeals to people.  I would like to offer a reflection why this might be based on a dream I had last night.  But first a little background on what I have been thinking about the last few days since my dreams seem to come from recent experiences.  

First, the last few days I discovered that the adoration chapel in Los Alamos has a book from Magnificant called "Praying with St Paul."  Now for most of my life St Paul has been one of my least favorite Saints and I did not care for him on a personal basis.  However in the last year or so he is now one of my most favorite Saints and I have wanted to learn more about him so I have been going in and reading the book.   So far one reflection I found very thought provoking and that is the shocking nature of the crucifix.  We do not think about it much but we are literally wearing recklessness of a guy being executed around our necks.  Imagine what people thought about that 2000 years ago.  Apparently St Paul was a big proponent of the Crucifix.  The modern equivalent would be to wear a t-shirt of a guy in an electric chair.  If you think about it this really is not that different than many of the heavy metal t-shirts out there.  It is not a very pleasant symbol.  We have just been sensitized to it. 


Second, 5 years ago I came across a situation that forced me to realize my view of the world might be incomplete.  I am naturally a very rational person and am not influenced much by emotion in comparison to most people.  However I came across a person who forced me to rethink my stance.  I began studying emotion and forgiveness in earnest.  Both it's strengths and weaknesses.  One person I came across during this study was Kina Grannis.  She is an independent musician from Los Angeles who gained a world-wide following on YouTube for her emotionally honest music.  I think personality wise we are in many ways opposites so I found it interesting to see her point of view of the world.  Every couple of months I might look and see what she is up to on her YouTube channel.  I did so last night and I came across.  Some collaboration she was doing with some former UCSD students.  Here it is.  It is called "The Last":





Now when I saw this I was impressed by their ability to use emotion to tell a story.  Now I went to UCSD for graduate school and in my experience it has a culture that is somewhat emotional and mellow in nature.  I can connect with some of the videos because they film them at apartment complexes I am familiar with.  It was not like my prior undergraduate experience at Colorado State which was much more rough.  I am not surprised these guys came out of this kind of ecosystem.  However a few things bothered me.  First, I have noticed that over the years Kina has subtly shed innocence.  She never claimed innocense as a trademark but as time has gone on it has happened.  She has subtly implied through her music that she is comfortable with not practicing chastity and this particular video reinforces that observation.  It is clear to me that we have different values systems.  It makes me sad, but I am not surprised.  Most people accept a non-chaste values system.  I am used to it.  That is also why though I am typically quite impressed when I come across the rare person who does.  Personally I am a big fan of innocence.  If you ever met me you might not think so but I am.  For instance I HATE swearing.  I hate it especially when I hear my brothers swear.  It makes me sad because they are eroding their dignity away when they do it.  Second, the story itself while heartwarming is not realistic.  If you talk to most people they will not have fond memories of may prior love interests.  Most of the time these stories are marked by betrayal and brokenness.  Sure you can learn something from them but at a very great cost.  It is debatable to me if the cost is even worth it.  My personal opinion is that it is important to guard your heart.  In reality emotion cannot heal these pains so I felt as if the movie was in some sense lying.  Kina and the other guy are in some sense lying to one another even because they have not made any kind of real commitment to one another.  I looked through comments on the video and I saw other people shared my point of view.  One of the most mysteries I spend the most time trying to gain more insight into justice, mercy and forgiveness and how this works in relationships.  Christianity seems to add a super-rational element to the discussion that is beyond understanding.  "Beyond I make all things new."  I am trying to find ways to understand this better in my own life.  For instance there have even been Saints you have made the claim that certain types of damage that can be engaged in during relationships that cannot even be healed by God.  God's justice and mercy are quite interesting for me to think about it is baffling. 

Anyways - let's get to the matter at hand...  Zombie's, now keep in mind this was a dream so it is a little hazy so please forgive ambiguity. 

In my dream I was transported back to my old house in San Diego.  Throughout the dream some friends and I were driving around town and I noticed that some of them were changing.  They were becoming agressive and they were hurting one another.  In particular they would tear at each other's skin especially around the face and mouth.  Generally with sharp objects such as knives and skewers. For all intended purposes they looked like zombies to me so that is how I will refer to them.  The people who were zombiefied were in various stages of zombification.  Some were only slightly zombies.  Others very much so and you could tell the difference based on how cut up they were.  The zombie's also really did not attack non-zombie's.  Only their own kind and it was proportional to how zombified the person was.  The most zombified person's were attacked the most.  The least zombified persons were attacked less so by other zombie's.  The zombie's sort of had a disease but not really. some of the zombies were able to get away from the lifestyle.  In fact some of my friends who had become zombified were able to get away from it and become normal again.  The zombies could not be described as mindless.  They had consciousness about them and the person they once were was still there.  It was more like they were totally enraged with hate.  Also, interestingly, the zombies did not really try to infect everyone to be zombies.  They mostly focused on their friends and family.  Effectively the zombies would form what were effectively family groups consisting of family and friends they had convinced to join them.  That is who they tried to pull down the most to live in the zombie life style.  They were not extremely violent about it.  It was more like a form of peer pressure they used to get people to join their group.  It is not really clear to me what exactly convinced people to decide to join a zombie family other than the fact they knew the other zombies as friends and family.  They did not hide the violence and torture they engaged in with each other and were quite open about it.  They actually seemed to convince others to join in.  Even though the zombies only recruited family and friends I could tell the epidemic was spreading across the city.    You just could not see it as you walked down the street unless you looked more closely and intimately.  In day to day life many of the zombies looked fairly normal.  The worst zombies looked only slightly cut up while they walked down the street.  You could particularly tell the home of a "zombie family."  When you did get into a house that was infected with zombiism the members of that family were in some sense literally torturng one another.  Their was typically one Alpha zombie in the house and a number of subservient zombies.  All the zombies would yell at each other and engage in tearing flesh off of each other's bodies and faces with knives and other sharp objects.

In particular one friend of mine (This person did not correspond to any person I actually know,  I just thought of him as close friend) was an alpha zombie.  As we were walking down the street together a rival group of zombies drove up in a white car and kidnapped my friend by throwing him in the car and driving off.  They wanted to make him a subservient zombie in their group.  They took him to the top of a building where the other zombies in their group were.  Myself and another friend were watching what was happing from the top of a neighboring building in hopes of rescuing him.  It turned out though that my friend was too strong a zombie for them and he took over as the head torturer of the group that kidnapped him.  I could watch him stab one of his kidnappers through the cheek with a knife and proceed to drag him around and take control of him.  I was worried he might be the worse zombie of all.  

The dream ended with me on the top of a metal roof where a zombie family was living.  In this particular home there were members in a much lower state of zombiism that did not participate in the torture or even hang out near it.  These persons would cook food and throw it to the more violent zombies to keep them in their state of death and their lifestyle of torture.  At this particular time we had just realized a particular chemical weakness of the zombies.  Unfortuntately the zombies realized it shortly after we did as well and had begun to take steps to work around it.  Basically the dream ended there.

Ordinarily I would just ignore a dream like this and think nothing of it, but I am kind of in a season of reflection right now so I decided to ponder it awhile and I asked God if there was anything worth learning from this.  Then I just zoned out and fell asleep again and when I woke up I had a thought. 

Zombies are essentially the "walking dead."  In some sense who else is the walking dead?  People not living in a state of grace.  I have often wondered what the world would look like if a person's state of grace were visible.  I wonder now if I have seen some glimpse of what that might look like.  So often I feel as though family/friends is either the ultimate conduit of virtue or vice.  Some family and friends just pull you down to a low common denominator and encourage sin.  This happens alot among people you would hope have your best interest at heart.  Think about all the unmarried couples living together or the friends who encourage others to steal or engage in various other things they should not be doing.  Sometimes even parents or aunts or uncles encourage sin at times.  No one is really innocent, and we have all led others to sin at some point.   It is not all bad though, sometimes family and friends do help get you out.  It goes both ways.  The low-order zombies throwing food to the worse zombies are kind of like enablers.  Somewhat involved but perhaps not to the same degree. In the end the worse zombies are only hurting themselves and those around them.  And the fact that people for no real reason joined the zombies was indicative of the irrational nature of sin.  There was hope and redemption too though.  As I said some zombie's left the zombie lifestyle.  I had friends in the dream that did this.  Even my friend who was one of the worst zombie's was trying to get out when he was more of his normal self on the street.   The thing is so many things look nice and friendly and sweet on the outside, but when you look closer things might not be so ordered. 

As time goes on I realize how much brokenness and hurt there is out there among people.  When you really try to follow a Christian lifestyle I have found you are shielded from alot of problems you may be totally ignorant of.  For instance I had a friend once tell me some problems he was having with his girlfriend.  I could not believe it because though I have had trouble with Catholic Ladies at times it was nothing like what he was describing.  After that I say give me the Catholic lady challenges any day thank you.  I definitely appreciated them more that day.  You don't appreciate this as much if you grow up Christian and hang out with Christian friends, but if you talk to people that have not had this benefit you can see real hurt.  Christians have their own hurt and challenges no doubt, but I would gladly take those problems over some of the more secular problems some people have shared with me.   Some people just seem somewhat hopeless.  That light of the world stuff is no joke. 

Ultimately what I cannot help but wonder is whether or not the appeal of the hordes of the "walking dead" resonates with some sense of spiritual death people are capable of feeling or want to avoid or see in others.  Do they feel they are spiritually dead and not realize that is what it is?   That is what I wonder.  It may be a stretch but maybe not. 

The Prodigal Son, Recovery, Relaxation and Growth.

Why do we sleep?  I was asking myself this question a few weeks ago.  I was particularly busy and I was wondering why we bothered with all this sleeping stuff.  I looking over the internet a little bit and as far as I can tell science does not really have a good answer to this one at this time. 

Last night I was eating dinner with a friend and she told me how she decided to give up eating one of her favorite foods for the sake of a special intention.  I asked her how long she thought that was going to go on, to which she replied, "Until I die if I have to,"  I told her, "God really doesn't work that way, he is usually actually friendlier than we humans are."  I told her she would probably be back to eating her favorite food by sometime next year.  God's "Yolk is easy and his burden is light."  In my experience we humans tend to be the ones to make things more blood and guts than they actually need to be.  I think it is a part of human nature.  Maybe broken human nature always trying to atone for things that we cannot. 

I was driving home this morning and I was thinking about the prodigal son and imagination.  I was thinking about the elder son.  In my life I tend to most identify with him.  A lot of people like to give the older son a hard time, but I just was not convinced that he was just some jealous/petty person.  I felt there was more to the story.  I have been reflecting on it all weekend. 

At first before the start of the weekend I realized explored the idea that the elder son was actually more respected by the Father.  The Father and the Elder son had a more adult relationship than the Father and the younger son.  In some sense the Father had to appease the spiritually weak younger son with parties much like a child needs to be entertained with toys.  This reminded me of people's conversion stories.  In the beginning they are usually very sweet and flowery.  Then later things get more difficult.  I thought he was simply providing the sons with what they need according to their current spiritual development. 

I realized there was a problem though and it was not this simple. - the father wanted the elder son to join the younger son at the party.  He wanted him to participate in the fun too.  He wanted him to also step away from the labor, he wanted him to go on the retreat.  He wanted everyone to take some time off and enjoy life and have the child-like spirit. 

Ideally is every conversion is an opportunity for rest and relaxation and celebration for everyone?  It may be up to us though whether or not we take it.

I think it is deeper than simply relaxation though.  In my own life periods of relaxation after more difficult periods are the time during which we revaluate what we are doing and where we are going.  This is the time we plot our new directions.  These periods are the rudders of our lives.  Small changes here greatly affect where we make our next steps.  This is the time at which we are really open to new ideas and creativity.  This is the time during which we can take risks.  This is where true new innovations and metamorphosis occurs.  These periods are times at which we truly transform instead of only making sequential progress.  Could every sinners conversion be an opportunity for the whole community to be transformed? The Father calling both sons to the party may be a call for both of them to be transformed and be brought to the next stage of their development.  The Father pleads for the older son to go.  I think he knows that what the older son is doing is good, but if he keeps up business as usually he will not get a chance to go on to the next stage of his growth.  He must go to the party and stop and smell the roses.  He must look for the next direction.  Much as the younger son has gone through his own hardships now is his time to rest.  Both sons have experienced hardships just of a different nature.  Both sons have been humbled.  One by living with the hogs.  The other acting as a servant to the Father.  They both must rest and recover. The Father wants them both to grow. 

Maybe sleep is God's way of reminding us all of the need to slow down so we can ultimately obtain transformative growth.  For many of us, if we could we would never sleep and just do, do, do.  For others, sleep is the more natural inclination.  There are some who would be happy just sleeping all the time.  Day and night remind us of both.  There are two sides to the coin.  Some people are naturally the Martha's always trying to organize stuff, others are the Mary's just trying to get in experiences.  This seems to come up over and over. Dante even maintained Day and Night in Purgatuario - Penitent souls could only travel up the mountain in the day by God's grace.  It was like there was an enforced retreat.  Learning to rest and enjoy is almost a requirement for learning to live in Paradise even in the demanding purification of Purgatory. 

"
But see now how the day is declining, and ascend

by night we cannot; therefore tis well to

think of some fair resting-place.
"
 Purgatuario:  CANTO VII -

Work and rest are part of the rhythm of life.  When we workout we must rest or we risk overtraining.  Too much rest leads to losing our edge.  In engineering and craftsman ship I find there is a time to put your nose to the grindstone, work hard, and hit the deadlines.  There is also a season to step back, relax, and review the literature, explore topics you have never considered, and even just daydream at times. This is why we have sabbaticals for professors. There is a concept of "Fast and slow" thinking that I believe maps to this. 

I think the homeless are a witness to this in some sense.  I have a policy of picking up hitchhikers to help they go where they need to go.  In my experience most homeless people did not get to be homeless by being responsible.  They often are very impulsive and somewhat scatterbrained.  They often have a tendency toward begin nomads.  I am not sure many of them would even want to live in a house if you gave them one.  They might just leave.  I am pretty convinced there are some people that are just born to be wanderers and would probably never fit into "established" society.  These people have a role to play.  I think they help remind us that we need to stop and smell the roses and look beyond ourselves.  They are almost like the lilies of the field. 

Every conversion is a party for everyone - To be happy is to be in tune with the will of the Father. It is a chance to learn to be in tune with the Father. 

I think this is part of the message Pope Francis is trying to get across.  He is downplaying things that we have held as important for so long.  He is downplaying our defensive position.  I have felt defensive about Catholisism my whole life.  I am tired of it.  But I recognize now to go through this metamorphisis we have to let something's go and trust that God will take care of them.  This is really scary, but honestly, are we really doing that great of a job of evangelizing the culture right now?  I think we are doing a pretty poor job personally.  We have tried our best and to some degree failed.  It is not futile.  Just the first step to humility.  Pope Francis is asking us to grow spiritually.  As Churchhill said:

" You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks."

When you really think about it all the important social issues we have been arguing over the last 60 years really come down to a root in greed and selfishness.  I feel when I was young I realized this but forgot somewhere along the way.  The root cause is what needs to be addressed and I am not sure that we have really tried to address it. 

Maybe some of us need to step back for a moment and just go with God's flow on this as scary as it might be. Not everything needs to be blood and guts on our part.